Judengasse

The old jewish quarter is one of the oldest streets in Germany. You will find it shortly before the market, Jews' Alley (Judengasse) on the right leads into the former medieval Jewish Quarter. Locally produced weights with Hebrew inscriptions show that there were Jews in Trier as early as the first or second century. Starting with the eleventh century, we have records of a Jewish community in Trier, and in 1235 four Jews had four houses built on the left of the later Judengasse. The cellars are still the original ones; in the Pub "Abwärts", you can still see the walled-up entrance to a flight tunnel leading to the Cathedral Close.

The Jews were expelled from Trier in 1418. Many Jews went east; Yiddish has preserved traces of Trier Middle High German up to today. When the Jews were called back after 1600, they settled in different parts of the city. After the Holocaust of the Nazi era, the Jewish community in Trier is quite small (the New Synagogue is located in Kaiserstrasse).